# From Narrow to Wide: Autoencoding Transformers for Ultrasound Bandwidth Recovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02938 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02938/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 10 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [SSAST: Self-Supervised Audio Spectrogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09784/) (2021)
- [MAE-AST: Masked Autoencoding Audio Spectrogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16691/) (2022)
- [Mitigating Aberration-Induced Noise: A Deep Learning-Based Aberration-to-Aberration Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11149/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conventional pulse-echo ultrasound suffers when low-cost probes deliver only narrow fractional bandwidths, elongating pulses and erasing high-frequency detail. We address this limitation by learning a data-driven mapping from band-limited to broadband spectrogram of radio-frequency (RF) lines. To this end, a variation of Tiny Vision Transform (ViT) auto-encoder is trained on simulation data using a curriculum-weighted loss. On heterogeneous speckle-cyst phantoms, the network reduces image-domain MSE by 90 percent, boosts PSNR by 6.7 dB, and raises SSIM to 0.965 compared with the narrow-band input. It also sharpens point-target rows in a completely unseen resolution phantom, demonstrating strong out-of-distribution generalisation without sacrificing frame rate or phase information. These results indicate that a purely software upgrade can endow installed narrow-band probes with broadband-like performance, potentially widening access to high-resolution ultrasound in resource-constrained settings.